Page 149 of Hello Stranger

She took my hovel’s rooftop and turned it into the most elegant place on earth.

So… quite different from the last party I’d been to up here. Where people were doing the worm.

Also different: I knew it was happening in advance.

I did not arrive wearing someone else’s coffee-spilled clothes.

In fact, Sue had even lent me one of my favorite dresses of hers to wear. A pale blue bias cut maxi dress with layers of ruffles at the hem. Blue because that was Sue’s favorite color. Ruffles because they looked like they were just longing for a reason to go up to a rooftop and give themselves to the wind.

Miracle of miracles: It fit. Like, something about the way it hugged me around the ribs and then cupped under my butt just made me feel slinky. In the very best way.

No Pajanket tonight.

It was all for Sue, of course—to celebrate the beginning of her married life with Witt. But I decided I could also quietly celebrate a new beginning for myself as well.

I mean, it had been a hell of a spring.

I’d faced some tough truths about life and myself and my family. I’d failed miserably at the only career I’d ever wanted to succeed in. I’d fallen madly in love with two people and then lost them both. I’d lost everything, in a way.

But then found other things. In other ways.

The point is, I was ready.

Ready to face the party. And the rest of my life. And all the impossible faces.

Though I wasn’t sure exactly how many of them I’d be able to see.

AS THE GUESTSclanked their way up the spiral stairs and filled up the roof, I’d guess my facial-recognition rate was fifty percent. I can’t say for sure, but the pattern seemed to be related to familiarity—to, maybe, the number of impressions my brain had already stored.

If I knew the person joining us on the rooftop, the features snapped right into place—fast and easy, like normal. When I saw Sue and Mrs. Kim—looking positively ethereal in their traditional hanbok dresses—I saw their lovely faces right away. I could see Witt and Mr. Kim just finein their suits as well—their faces just sensibly resting on their heads as if they’d never been gone.

If I didn’t know the person at all, though—Witt’s grandmother, for example—the faces stayed disjointed. If I knew the person a little bit—an acquaintance, say… the face might start out unreadable but then slide into place a little later, like it resisted for a minute and then finally gave in.

It was unbelievably trippy.

But it was also progress.

I confess, I’d been hoping to put on that dress, walk out on that roof, and see every face with total ease in a blaze of triumph—just exactly like old times.

But it wasn’t exactly like old times.

In some ways, it was better. Because seeing familiar faces again was a joy. And not seeing unfamiliar faces?

It was fine.

It was manageable.

The last time I’d been on this roof at a party, I was positively nauseated with fear.

But tonight? I was okay.

If I recognized a person, great. If I didn’t, that was okay, too.

That was triumphant in its own quiet way.

Before the party, I’d come up with a throwdown phrase in case I started to panic, and it went like this: “Help me out here. I have a facial recognition problem. Have we met before?”

Want to know what the hardest part of that phrase was? The wordhelp.”

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